Chula Vista native and self-taught animator Victor Navone had mixed feelings when he first received an email from Pixar in 1999.

Having applied for several positions at the Emeryville animation studio, Navone was already in possession of the “thanks, but no thanks” rejection postcard from the human resources department.

By this point, he had decided to focus on a career in visual effects, setting his sights on landing a position at George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic. But the name on the email rang a bell for Navone, and a quick Internet search told him all he needed to know. The president of Pixar, Ed Catmull, had invited him for an interview.

Twelve years later, Navone, a married father of two, is happily entrenched in the powerhouse that is Pixar, having worked on every major project (and plenty of smaller ones) since 2001’s “Monsters, Inc.” With the studio’s latest release, “Cars 2,” Navone earns his first directing animator credit on a feature film and, one gets the feeling, he’s still got a long way to go.

So how did a young video game designer with no professional animation experience end up on such hallowed ground? The simple answer: He got bored.

After graduating from Bonita Vista High School and then the University of California Irvine in the early ’90s, Navone returned to San Diego, unsure what he wanted to do with his degree in fine art. He eventually landed a job as a conceptual designer at a now-defunct video game company in Sorrento Valley, where he discovered the power of combining technology and art. After four years with the company and a promotion to art director, Navone started to get restless. “I thought I’d learned all I was going to learn,” he explained.

This was 1999, when feature film animation was undergoing a revolution, not only with the overwhelming success of Pixar’s computer-animated films like “Toy Story 2” and “A Bug’s Life,” but also with the availability of affordable desktop software that made animation technology accessible to people outside the studio system. Navone saw the opportunity and seized it. “I convinced the company to buy some animation software for me, and I just started playing around on my own, teaching myself character animation,” he confessed.

While Navone’s résumé didn’t get the attention of Pixar brass, one of his early animation tests did. He originally posted his 43-second video “Alien Song,” featuring a saucy one-eyed alien belting out Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” to an online forum for character animators, hoping to get some feedback. Instead, the video got Navone an interview at Pixar and the unofficial honor of creating one of the first “viral videos” on the Internet.

“Before I knew it, people started e-mailing it to each other and to their friends outside of the industry, and it kind of took off. I never really intended for it to go out and get wide distribution. It just kind of happened.” (You can still see the video on YouTube.)

As a solo animator for only two years, Navone faced a huge learning curve during his first months at Pixar. “I was thrust into the animation department with arguably some of the greatest animators working at the time, so I did my best to keep my head above water and learn all I could,” Navone said. “Luckily there’s a real spirit of collaboration and mentorship at Pixar. People don’t close their doors, and they’re really open to sharing ideas with each other, giving feedback and helping each other get better.”

Having worked on the first “Cars” film, as well as several “Cars”-related commercials and cartoon shorts, the 40-year-old Navone got to return the favor by teaching the “rules of the ‘Cars’ world” to a new generation of animators during production on the sequel. As a directing animator on the film, Navone helped supervise the large team of animators and coordinated with the supervising animators, who oversee all of the film’s animation and work closely with the director.

With an extremely tight time line and the film’s director, two-time Academy Award-winner John Lasseter, busy with his duties as chief creative officer for Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios, Navone was ready to step up when asked. “(We) had a lot more room to be assertive, take on more leadership roles and to guide the ship while (Lasseter) was elsewhere,” Navone said. “Luckily, John’s the kind of director who would trust us to do that, and it worked out really well. “

If there’s a lesson in Navone’s success, it’s in the cool balance he achieves between a constant pursuit of knowledge and a laid-back, “go with the flow” attitude — a style that could easily have come from his San Diego roots. “My M.O. is always to do good work, try to educate myself and be open to whatever opportunities present themselves. And so far that’s paid off for me,” Navone said. “I never intended to be an animator until, suddenly, Pixar was knocking at my door. Had I had a career path in mind, I might not have taken that opportunity. But now that I’m here, I’m so glad I did.”

Alison Gang is the U-T’s movie critic. Email her at alison@alisongang.com